As automatic FER is an effort to mimic the natural capacity of humans to recognize facial expressions, one must look back on humans to get insight for the models. One thing to note is that humans are not necessarily better than deep neural networks in the task of classifying images. Human performance on the (non-updated) FER2013 dataset was 65\(\pm \) 5% [1]}, while the then-SOTA model, ResMaskingNet [2]} reached 76.82%. However, this does not mean machines have outperformed humans in facial expression recognition in general. As stated above, recognizing someone's facial expression in the real world represents quite different challenges.
